What can you say about a book, published
by Viking and Penguin as non-fiction, which claims the Hebrew Bible
contains coded references to events in the present and future, put
there by space aliens whose spacecraft remains buried under a peninsula
on the Jordan side of the Dead Sea? Well, actually a number of
adjectives come to mind, most of them rather pithy. The astonishing and
somewhat disturbing thing, if the author is to believed, is that he has
managed to pitch this theory and the apocalyptic near-term prophecies
he derives from it to major players on the world stage including Shimon
Peres, Yasir Arafat, Clinton's chief of staff John Podesta in a White
House meeting in 2000, and in a 2003 briefing at the Pentagon, to the
head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other senior figures at
the invitation of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. If this
is the kind of input that's informing decisions about the Middle East,
it's difficult to be optimistic about the future. When predicting an
“atomic holocaust” for 2006 in The Bible Code 2, Drosnin
neglects to mention that in chapter 6 of his original 1997 The Bible Code, he predicted
it for either 2000 or 2006, but I suppose that's standard
operating procedure in the prophecy biz.